The number of users on the Internet continues to grow at an astounding rate while businesses continue to rapidly commercialize its use. As users surf through websites, they generate a high volume of traffic over the Internet. Increasingly, businesses take advantage of this traffic by advertising their products or services on the Internet. These advertisements may appear in the form of leased advertising space, often called “banners,” on websites, which are similar to rented billboard space in highways and cities or commercials broadcasted during television/radio programs.
Optimal advertisement placement has become a critical competitive advantage for the Internet advertising business. Users are spending an ever-increasing amount of time online viewing web pages that can be customized to fit a user profile.
One method for valuing exposure of advertisements posted on a website may be based on frequency of exposure. This method allows one to control the frequency of exposure of an advertisement by, among other things, predicting the exposure (i.e., number of impressions, viewers, actions, website hits, mouse clicks, etc.) on a given website or group of websites during an advertising campaign. Advertisers favor specific frequencies and do not want a user to become too inundated in advertisement viewing. At the same time advertisers also do not want a user to be under-exposed and thus an uninterested or inattentive customer.
Arrangements with advertisers tend to be composed of campaigns, each lasting from days to weeks. The advertisers may have a target frequency for each viewer, i.e., show the advertisement a specified number of times to each customer, such as 5 times, possibly at intervals of once every 7 days. Once a customer views the campaign the 5th time, the advertisement can stop being shown to the customer. This process is referred to as a frequency cap.
FIG. 1 illustrates, using a histogram, the frequency of views by the number of people viewing an advertisement under a traditional method of frequency capping. As shown, during a campaign, a high number of people will see the advertisement the preferred number of viewing times (i.e., 5 views). Unfortunately, a large number of people who have seen the advertisement less than the preferred number of viewing times are left (i.e., 1, 2, 3, or 4 views).
Thus, there is a need for a method of increasing the number of people who see an advertisement the preferred number of viewings and decreasing the number of people who see an advertisement less then the preferred number of viewings. Furthermore, there is a need for a method to control the frequency of viewing the advertisement.